Ben Lynch

Dr. Mark Hyman has done it again with a powerful all-new online docuseries called Broken Brain 2: The Body-Mind Connection as a follow-up to his very popular earlier online docuseries. Some of the big topics that are covered mycotoxins and mold toxicity, the heart-brain connection, the role of genetics and your environment and of course diet and lifestyle.

In the first episode, Dr. Hyman shares his own and very recent personal story with mold toxicity, how it damaged his brain and how he recovered:

My mold toxicity started off as a cough I just couldn’t kick. After seeing several doctors (something even a doctor has to do sometimes!) I was advised that it could be mold. My house was the prime suspect and my hunch was right, and so began the process of healing my body and gutting my home. I was at one point so sick I couldn’t get out of bed; my mind and body felt like they were failing me and I was desperate to feel like myself again.

In a later episode, Dr. Hyman also shares how the connection between the heart and brain is a great example of the body’s interconnectedness at work:

People often think the brain is the one sending signals to the heart, instructing it to pump blood throughout the body. But there is much more to the story. The heart actually sends MORE signals to the brain than the other way around. The rhythm of the heart is extremely influential—it can signal a state of calm or one of stress, which the nervous system and brain register and share with the rest of the body.

That means your emotional and physical experiences all tie back to the rhythm of the heart. When we’re in a chronic state of stress, that disordered heart rate becomes our norm, and the amygdala gets familiar with it; the brain actually gets comfortable with it and sees it as our baseline.

For this reason, heart rate variability, or HRV, can be used as a dynamic tool to reset our heart-brain connection. We want to strive for a state of coherence—a smooth wave pattern in heart rate variability over time. This coherence is a reflection of a balance between the parasympathetic or relaxation nervous system and our sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight system.

Coherence is the natural state of feeling good and it sends the most beneficial signals to the brain; it actually means we are able to send more information through the vagus nerve to the brain and when we’re in this state frequently it sets a new baseline, one that keeps the body relaxed, enhances cognition, and keeps our physiology balanced.

The powerful evidence behind the heart-brain connection has given birth to a concept called HeartMath, a methodology that assesses HRV and encourages self-regulation practices to promote heart-brain coherence for optimal health.

Dr Hyman and the experts will be doing a deep dive into HeartMath and the importance of the heart-brain connection in Broken Brain 2: The Body-Mind Connection.

Here are some gems and inspiration from a few of the 70 health experts you can expect to learn from in the docuseries.

Dr. Chris Kresser on mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic disease….

Dr. Ben Lynch on our genes and the environment …

And some inspiration from Dr. Ann Shippy during her discussion on mold toxicity and brain health …

I am privileged and honored to have a very small cameo section in the docuseries!

Here is some of my advice to find something you love to do and have fun…

Easy methods to heal yourself from destructive beliefs and traumas that impact your mind and body…

How to use your personal genetics to improve your brain and overall health…

The little-known link between your brain health and your eyes, teeth, and gums…

A simple morning routine for more success and better brain health…

And much, much more…

In Broken Brain 2, you’ll learn all about the functional medicine approaches available for overcoming a variety of toxic environmental exposures, including mold, as well as how to heal from toxic beliefs, support the heart-brain connection, understand immunity in the brain, and so much more.

Over the course of 8 full-length episodes, you’ll learn cutting-edge strategies to help you heal your own mind, brain, and body. Here are all 8 episodes and when they will air:

Our exposure to “Electrosmog” from cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, smart meters and cell phone towers is increasing steadily and we can’t deny it anymore — electromagnetic fields (EMFs) — are making people sick. EMF exposure is now thought to be just as important as exposure to pesticides, mold, heavy metals or any other kind of environmental toxin:

Magda Havas from Trent University: up to 33% of the population has “mild to moderate symptoms” of electro sensitivity

Dietrich Klinghardt, health pioneer and Medical Director at the Sophia Health Institute: “patients suffering from chronic illness will likely never heal unless you reduce their exposure to Electrosmog.”

the mechanism of action of microwave EMFs, the role of the VGCCs [voltage-gated calcium channels] in the brain, the impact of non-thermal EMFs on the brain, extensive epidemiological studies performed over the past 50 years, and five criteria testing for causality, all collectively show that various non-thermal microwave EMF exposures produce diverse neuropsychiatric effects.

In February I announced the live version and I know a number of you jumped right in and did the training with me! What an amazing course it was!

Here is my official testimonial:

This is the most intellectually-stimulating course I’ve done in a long time! Nick’s expertise is exceptional, the research expansive (and quite mind-blowing!), the practical solutions excellent and the Facebook community invaluable! The knowledge I’ve gained is going to be a game-changer for every single one of my clients. I HIGHLY recommend this course!

I was limited by word count and could have shared much more! Nick invited me to be part of the beta group and I actually said this to him: “I’ve read your book and it’s brilliant – I’m not sure I really need to do a course too” Boy was I wrong!

This training focuses on the clinical side of EMFs as an environmental factor contributing to ill health (including widespread neuropsychiatric effects) and includes critical information on what to ask your patients/clients to assess if they’re being over-exposed, how EMFs could disrupt the protocols you’re giving them, how to help them mitigate the effects of EMFs and how to make them more resilient to the effects.

If you want to learn latest evidence-based, cutting-edge, credible information on how Electrosmog exposure affects your patients/clients, how to prevent EMF-related symptoms and illness, and how to support those clients/patients who have symptoms, then I recommend this course.

The course includes all replays (audio, video, transcripts) of each of the 5 webinars, the 5 bonus interviews, access to the private members-only Facebook group packed with cutting-edge discussions, and several bonus cheat sheets that have been added based on group feedback.

He has also interviewed and collaborated with some of the best minds in healing including Dr. Klinghardt, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Ben Lynch and many more and the course offers these interviews as a bonus. Here is what I learned from his interview with Dr. Klinghart:

After applying a few evidence-based solutions to reduce exposure to this new environmental toxin, Klinghardt sees patients with chronic diseases such as Lyme, ALS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, MS, autism and fibromyalgia heal faster — making every single supplement or protocol he sends their way more effective.

We also learned about EMF mitigation efforts for autism/ASD and autoimmune disease:

One of the most compelling studies I learned about is the study by Trevor Marshall, MD and Trudy Heil, RN: Electrosmog and autoimmune disease. In this study, 90% of the participants – all with an autoimmune diagnosis of either arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, sjogrens or celiac disease – reported improved symptoms as a result of wearing silver-threaded EMF protective caps.

And based on what I learned in the course, I’m speculating (and extrapolating from some of the research) that EMF overload may play a role in chronic anxiety, insomnia, benzodiazepine issues, SIBO, high cortisol and dietary oxalate issues in some susceptible individuals. I blog in great detail about this here: Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health

You can watch his Mindshare presentation here:

Nick shares this wisdom

If you’ve never seen a patient or client whose health is being affected by EMFs, it’s very likely that you’ve missed it.

UPDATE March 7, 2018 – Another 200 seats have been added today and are now available for purchase. He is limiting the number so he can address all questions from participants. If you signed up prior to today you should have seen an email from Nick about this. You can also use this link to purchase: Electrosmog RX

The section on antibiotic resistance genes is part of the discussion about the stool testing that Dr. Brady recommends: the GI Map test by Diagnostic Solutions Lab, a PCR/DNA test he helped to develop.

Before they get to the antibiotic resistance genes discussion, Dr. Brady shares more about this 2-year old test and why he has found it superior to other stool testing, sharing that it’s more comprehensive than what the gastroenterologist would do, plus the fact that other functional stool tests rely on culture technologies which has the limitation that you can only test bugs that you can grow. He shares that:

More than 95% of bugs in the gut can’t be grown on a petri dish. They are anaerobes or they are very difficult to culture.

He also discusses the process of testing for sensitivities to herbs (in some of the other stool tests) i.e. what herb will kill what bug, sharing that this is a flawed method:

While dropping specific prescriptive antibiotics on a culture has been methodically worked out to correlate with a certain dose of that antibiotic orally, it’s never been done for herbs and volatile oils.

Dr. Brady does discuss one other major advantage of the GI MAP test:

We look for antibiotic resistance genes, both phenotype and genotype of the microbiotia and looking through the genetic signatures of antibiotic resistance. So if you’re going to use a prescriptive antibiotic, we can tell you if the microbiotia of the patient harbors the genes for resistance to sulfonamide or fluoroquinolones or some others.

I see great value in this beyond finding a solution for addressing the pathogens. This is because we know antibiotics have side-effects and some like the fluroquinolones can actually cause anxiety, depression, insomnia, panic attacks, clouded thinking, depersonalization, suicidal thoughts, psychosis, nightmares, and impaired memory. We cover this in detail in the Anxiety Summit interview with Lisa Bloomquist, fluoroquinolone toxicity patient advocate: Antibiotic Induced Anxiety – How Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics Induce Psychiatric Illness Symptoms

When it comes to genetics work and testing, dr. Brady endorses Dr. Peter D’Adamo, Opus23 and Dr. Ben Lynch, recognizing the importance of science and looking at the clinical presentation of the patient rather than individual SNPs. I would have loved hearing some examples of what he means by this.

All in all, this is a fascinating interview and well worth listening to!

Dr. Ben Lynch is hosting the Dirty Genes Summit Jan 22-39 and he shares this about you and your genes:

You are not a victim of circumstance… born with bad genes, destined to die of whatever your family tree has genetically bequeathed you.

The way your genes express is unique – and it can change throughout your life.

Knowing how to create that change is vitally important and you’ll see how clear this is in his wonderful histamine interview with Yasmina Ykelenstam of Healing Histamine.

I love the bucket analogy where Yasmina shares about histamine and inflammation:

Imagine the body as a giant bucket and there is only so much inflammation you can put into it before our inflammation causing behaviors that you can fill it up with before you spill over symptoms. So let’s say you fill it with a few high histamine foods; then you feel it up with stress; then you fill it up to being exposed to animal hair (dander); then pollen season starts; and woah, we’re right, right, right at the top; and then we eat an apple which is not high histamine, it doesn’t cause inflammation, in fact, it’s anti-inflammatory; and suddenly we spill over because the active digestion itself is an inflammatory process.

We blame the poor little apple and not the hamburger we ate the week ago that started the inflammation bucket filling up. We don’t blame the puppy because we love the doggy so much. We certainly don’t blame our stress because we don’t want to take too hard a look at our lives and how difficult it would be for us to make changes, steps to take real steps to handle our stress and to start meditating or to remove stressful processes from our life because that’s just too much for us to handle

She shares how you can combat some of this by adding foods with

anti-properties: anti-histamine and anti-inflammatory properties…I just stopped eating the wrong high histamine foods, the processed ones, the sugary ones, the ones that added nothing to my life beyond the two seconds in my mouth.

Dr. Lynch asks Yasmina to list symptoms she experienced in this midst of her histamine issues (many of which are commonly seen in individuals with histamine issues)

IBS, which is mostly loose stools or being totally bound up so you can’t go to the bathroom for 8 days and they tend to go back and forth… severe swelling of the stomach – what I call basketball stomach… At my worse, it was projectile vomiting and constant nausea, and constant until it went away… chronic migraines. I once had migraines every day for six months before they went away. Common symptoms include dizziness, brain fog, low blood pressure, feeling dizzy when you stand up… really, inability to think straight is a really, really big one. It’s kind of like somebody almost puts a wet blanket over your brain. It tends to happen after you eat.

She also shares how fatigue after eating is often an issue. And how intolerance to alcohol is a factor, specifically red wine:

Most people do better with tequila, vodka, rum and gin, although alcohol paralyzes the thiamine oxidase, histamine degrading enzyme.

There is also a mental health impact from histamine issues – histamine is a neurotransmitter – and Yasmina shares how this may impact you:

…it affects dopamine, GABA, serotonin, and it can make us depressed. It can also make us manic as I discovered in my teens. It can mimic the symptoms of bipolar disorder and also schizophrenia. There’s been a few interesting studies where certain types of antihistamines that are not available on the market were able to reverse schizophrenia symptoms better than antipsychotic medications.

Anxiety is also a very, very big histamine symptom and whenever I see somebody who has a histamine problem, they do tend to be quite stressed out and kind of the chicken or the egg, which came first. But definitely histamine causes more stress and anxiety and that again is in the medical research.

This statement about symptoms rotating was new to me and may be new to you too:

It has to be consistent and then it goes away and then it comes back again. That’s what’s really confusing about histamine because: 1. It mimics many disorders, and 2. The symptoms rotate

All in all, this is a fascinating interview and well worth listening to!

Join the summit and you will learn that your genes can be turned off or on and this event will teach:

How Do Your Genes Impact You?

How to Clean Your Genes With Food

About Your Genes and Your Mental Health

How to Alter Your Genetic Expression

The Building Blocks of Healthy Families (and generations!)

An Understanding of How Your Genes Work

Genetic Testing and How to Clean Up Your Genes for the Long Term

Register for the Dirty Genes Summit here – to hear this entire interview and learn from Dr. Ben Lynch and the other experts he interviews.

If my understanding is correct, William Walsh of the Walsh Research Institute explains that folates of any kind (methylfolate, folic acid, etc) will cause there to be less serotonin activity at the synapse because folates promote the expression of the SERT enzyme which increases serotonin reuptake. He warns that those who are undermethylators should not take folate if they have cognitive/mood issues, as it will make their anxiety or depression worse. Since those with the MTHFR gene defect are likely undermethylators, his advice contradicts Dr Lynch’s advice regarding the use of folate. Could you ask Dr Lynch if he has any opinion regarding this?

Dr. Walsh has treated over 30,000 patients with mental health problems and has one of the largest lab chemistry data bases in the world. It would be great to see the top doctors collaborating on the methylation cycle as it seems to be a large piece of the puzzle for so many people. Maybe a methylation summit? It’s such a complicated and confusing subject and there seems to be some contradictory information out there.

This was my response:

These are excellent questions you bring up!

The terminology can be confusing so I will recap my understanding here:

This is from the work of Carl Pfeiffer (his book “Nutrition and Mental Illness” is excellent) and is also written about in Joan Matthews Larson’s wonderful book “Depression-Free Naturally” and Eva Edelman’s “Natural Healing for Schizophrenia.”

As you’re aware Dr. Walsh uses this terminology too. His book is “Nutrient Power.” Here is a snippet from a powerpoint of his called The Role of Epigenetics in Mental Health

For undermethylators, the harmful impact of folic acid at NT synapses greatly exceeds the benefits of normalizing methylation.

So there is a place for methylfolate. I don’t know anything about SERT and DAT transporter proteins so can’t comment on that aspect, but look forward to learning more.

You say “Since those with the MTHFR gene defect are likely undermethylators.” I don’t know that this is a true statement. I would love to see a source for this? It’s certainly not the case with me – I have the MTHFR 1298C defect and have low histamine/histapenia/overmethylation (using the Carl Pfeiffer terminology).

As far as I’m aware Dr Walsh does NOT feel the MTHFR defects play a role in all of this. I hope to learn more and interview him on a future Anxiety Summit.

I have not seen Dr. Lynch write about histapenia and histadelia or the work of Carl Pfeiffer, although some recent comments in this blog refer to Walsh and Dr. Lynch says he’ll check it out.

Dr. Lynch is not a big fan of the terms overmethylation and undermethylation. And when he talks about overmethylation and undermethylation I think he is referring to the methylation process being more effective/speeding up and being less effective/slowing down within a few days of adding methylfolate supplements.

So I feel we have some terminology differences AND some differences of opinions.

Both Dr. Walsh and Dr. Lynch see amazing results with their patients/clients but I agree with you – I’d love to clear up some of the confusion. I’m going send this question and my answer to Dr. Lynch for our interview next Friday. Since he may need to do some additional prep/research, we may have to do a deeper dive into this question on a future summit. Hopefully he’ll be able to add something to the discussion this time.

I did also interview Yamsina (www.thelowhistaminechef.com) for this summit and she too was not familiar with the work of Carl Pfeiffer so it’s exciting that we can all learn from each other and advance the field.

Finally, this is not all bad because it gets us thinking and asking questions and digging deeper.

Paula then has this follow-up question:

The following quote from this link gave me the impression that the MTHFR mutation usually caused undermethylation, but farther down it also references where Dr Walsh says it’s possible to have MTHFR and not be undermethylated.

In your opinion, do people fall into either an overmethylated or undermethylated status or can you be an undermethylator in certain areas of the methylation cycle and an overmethylator in other areas of the cycle? If someone has some traits of an undermethylator and some traits of an overmethylator, what would you recommend?

Dr. Walsh: Based on my massive chemistry database, about 22% of the population is undermethylated and 8% overmethylated. These are inborn tendencies that usually persist throughout life. Undermethylation usually results from single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that weaken MTHFR or other enzymes in the methylation cycle. Overmethylation is generally caused by enzyme weaknesses (SNPs) in the SAMe utilization pathways.

What are your thoughts on using genetic testing, such as “23 and Me” to create an individual methylation roadmap/treatment plan.

Dr. Walsh: Genetic testing is quite inexpensive, highly accurate, reliable, and will certainly grow in importance in future years. These tests can already identify predispositions for many disorders such as breast cancer and Alzheimer’s and may soon obsolete the need for pap smears. However the reliability of genetic testing for assessing methylation is quite limited at present.

Identifying SNP weaknesses in MTHFR and other methylation-cycle enzymes does not necessarily mean that individual is undermethylated. There is a “tug-of-war” competition between enzyme SNPs that weaken methylation and SNPs in the SAMe utilization pathway that can produce overmethylation.

I believe you’re right Trudy in saying this is not all bad because it gets everyone thinking and digging deeper. I think both Dr Lynch and Dr Walsh bring invaluable information to the discussion, each adding something that can further illuminate how this complicated process works. Thanks again to you for providing us an opportunity to ask questions.

And this is my response:

This is a perfect summary of Dr Walsh’s approach – thank you!

This part is interesting: “Undermethylation usually results from single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that weaken MTHFR or other enzymes in the methylation cycle. Overmethylation is generally caused by enzyme weaknesses (SNPs) in the SAMe utilization pathways.” I’d love to know which ones… and then he says “However the reliability of genetic testing for assessing methylation is quite limited at present”

His percentages are also interesting and I would challenge this saying it’s very likely based on the people he has worked with: 22% of the population is undermethylated (high histamine) and 8% overmethylated (low histamine).

When I worked with Julia Ross we saw way more low histamine and that is likely because we worked with more women who seem to be prone to low histamine.

This is also what Carl Pfeiffer found: “These are inborn tendencies that usually persist throughout life” and was my understanding until I started learning from Dr Lynch 2 years ago. Now I’m confused too!

Here is a nice post by Chris Kresser: Methylation – What it is and why should you care. I’m going to paraphrase some of it. He says yes do the 23and me testing but: “genetics do not always predict functional methylation capacity”…”I really believe that we need to be testing both”… “There are different ways to test functional methylation capacity. Doctor’s Data has a methylation panel blood test. Health Diagnostics and Research Institute has a Methylation Pathways Panel that’s good and I tend to use in my practice. Genova has a Complete Hormones profile that, among other things, looks at the ability to convert proliferative estrogen metabolites into less proliferative metabolites, and those conversions are methylation dependent. So if you see poor conversion happening there, that’s a methylation issue. The urine organics acids profile from Genova has some methylation markers, active folate and B12 deficiency. And then a urine amino acids profile can be helpful to look at taurine levels and levels of other metabolites in the methylation cycle.”

This above blog has comments about Dr. Walsh and Dr. Lynch too so they are worth a read.

Of course Dr. Lynch supports the fact that just because you have a defect it doesn’t mean you are affected by it so the additional functional testing makes total sense. And he recommends this additional testing too.

I feel it’s time to mesh the old research and prior work Carl Pfeiffer did, the work Dr. Walsh is doing, Dr. Lynch’s work and the new methylation research. And the wisdom from other practitioners like Chris Kresser and people like you who are digging and reading and asking questions

We clearly all have lots to learn! I know I don’t have the answers! This topic has been front and center in my mind for awhile so it’s good to get it down in writing here (so thanks Paula, for asking this question!)

MTHFR helps produce the body’s most active form of folate. So when you eat your uncooked leafy greens or your steamed leafy greens, you are getting ample amounts of methylfolate, which is great. But if you’re eating your dried cereal, your energy bars, your energy drinks or taking your prenatal vitamins and you think you’re doing a great thing and all of these things have this synthetic folic acid, then that is a big problem, because folic acid is absolutely synthetic and that folic acid has to be transformed into the most active form of folate, which is methylfolate because that’s what your body uses. It doesn’t use folic acid. You think folic acid is actually useful for things like neural tube defects, but it’s not; it actually has to be transformed. And so MTHFR contributes the last most important step for that to happen.

Methylfolate, along with vitamin B12, and the protein that you eat help make one of the most important compounds called SAMe. So when you eat your protein and your methylfolate levels are adequate, then you are able to make your neurotransmitters. And if you are unable to make neurotransmitters or eliminate them, you’re going to have symptoms of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenic episodes, manic episodes, and so on.

The GAD enzyme helps get rid of glutamate and turns that into our docile calming GABA neurotransmitter. It needs magnesium and vitamin B6 to function.

One gene that’s very common in the population that’s also kind of messed up is COMT. COMT is a gene which does multiple, multiple things, but one of which is helps break down dopamine. The other one, it helps break down estrogen.

Another one for anxiety is MAOA, so that’s monoamine oxidase. Histamine is very related to anxiety, and that’s tied in because of the MAOA enzyme, so reducing your histamine-containing foods is a big one.